Village Gamer

I want to wish all of Village Gamer’s readers and friends a very happy, productive, profitable and safe New Year. To those of you who have supported the site with product copies for review and news items, thank you – your support has been greatly appreciated. To those who are still waiting on reviews to be completed – I’m working on it – The Cavechild (who has vowed to get out more in 2010) has been assisting in some areas, and the two of us are working through the backlog to get caught up while Scott is kept busy on the server side of things. I occasionally kidnap some of the volunteer staff from our other site to help out with the chores, and I have to thank them for stepping up to the plate when needed.

I certainly wasn’t prepared for the welcome and success Village Gamer has enjoyed over the past year, and while this is all very good,  I’ve found that my time and project management skills are due for a major upgrade.  These are areas which I will be seriously working on as Village Gamer continues to grow and move forward into the next decade – but I can’t talk about that yet, Orby has me under an NDA and I wouldn’t want to end up like the fireworks he’s found – I’m not really sure just what his joystick controller is attached to, so I’ll have to wait on the sharing of news about Village Gamer’s future.

In the meantime, as we look back on the turbulence of 2009, all of us saw many local studios fade to black as they closed their doors forever. While the resulting talent pool is a boon to the other remaining and opening-soon studios, it was still sad to see the game development landscape go through such a major shift. I can only hope that 2010 will bring a brighter outlook for BC’s development industry, especially as we welcome new studios and production houses – let’s all hope that the closing of studios has ended with the passing of this first decade of the 21st century.

This past year also saw the merging of New Media BC and winBC to become DigiBC. This is an event which I am still not convinced was the best move for a provincial industry association, but I will save that opinion for a later post. The digital media industry has grown in both strength and exposure in recent years – not just in Canada but globally, and as provincial governments now vie to have the biggest studios in their respective provinces, we see even more shifting of the digital landscape. This is one of those times when I wish that our country was more united and willing to work together for the betterment of all Canadians instead of just looking out for their own provincial interests. I am in agreement with those involved with the Canada 3.0 forum – we need a viable national strategy, because the times are-a-changing and Canada, while it’s a big country, isn’t really big enough to successfully maintain a hostile and competitive atmosphere among regions as the digital technology industry matures.

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Aldergrove – Village Gamer is holding its first Readers’ Choice Canadian Video Game Awards and we’re now open for nominations. More than one Canadian property or component can be nominated on each form, as we’ve allowed for multiple text lines on the nomination form. You can make nominations for one category or all of them – the choice is yours. Help us recognize the incredible talent and creativity of the Canadian video game industry.

The rules are few and simple:

* Nominated titles must have been released between January 1 and December 31 2009.
* Nominated titles must have been developed by a Canadian studio.
* Components for a Foreign Title means levels, features, audio or world object designs made in Canada for a title by a non-Canadian developer – please name Game, Studio and Components developed.
* Nominations close at midnight on December 31 2009.
* Round One Public Voting for the Top Ten begins on January 1 2010 and closes on January 15 2010.
* Final Public Voting begins on January 16 2010 and closes January 31 2010.
* Winners will be announced on February 1 2010.

Good luck, everyone!

Readers’ Choice Canadian Video Game Awards

Orby

Vancouver – Yes, I have succumbed to the pressure and opened an account for Village Gamer on Twitter. Our account name on Twitter is VillageGamer – you’ll recognize Orby as our avatar if you search us out over there. It might have had something to do with Noelle Hunt Bennett (Big Fish Games) threatening to force feed Twitter lessons to me at the Casual Connect Conference next month in July. If any of you know Noelle, you know she’ll follow through with that threat, so I figured that I would beat her to the punch. Sort of. If I figure out how to use it to full advantage before the conference.

Which brings me to another small update. The Women In Games Vancouver group is partnering with Women in Games International and the IGDA to present a Leadership Development Forum on Monday July 20th at Casual Connect Seattle. The Leadership Forum, which is still being finalized, will be held at The Triple Door. I have been invited to participate on one of the panels, and if the powers that be in the Passport Office so deem, I will have new and valid “government-issued travel documents” before the conference.

In other news, I can’t believe how much our readership has grown. In just the first six months of 2009 we have doubled what we did for all of last year. As of June 17th, we’ve logged just over 2 million hits on the site and our Alexa rank has gone from over 7 million at launch to a current ranking of 468 008. So, thank you to all of you who come and read the news on Village Gamer – we appreciate your time and your support.

Village Gamer would like to wish all of our readers a very happy and safe holiday season.

Thank you for sending us your news and for helping to make our first seven months online a success. We look forward to continuing our growth in 2009, along with all of the new and cool games, programmes and innovations developed by Canada’s very talented digital media industry.

All the best to you and yours in 2009 and beyond.

TORONTO – Cookie Jar Entertainment has signed a five-year deal with Toronto-based Kaboose, Inc., one of the largest family-focused new media companies in the world, to revitalize its Mommy & Me brand online and represent the property’s audience to advertisers targeting its prized demographic of moms. The Kaboose-managed site is set to re-launch in early 2009 and will be supported by an extensive offline marketing campaign, including Mommy & Me preschool products sold at retail nationwide, TV advertising, radio promotions, print and direct mail advertising and comprehensive mommy-targeted public relations.

The revamped Mommy & Me website, will join Kaboose’s community of premium mom-focused properties and will feature daily mom-targeted content and activities, a new and improved Playgroup Finder and other valuable tools, local resources and communities led by Kaboose’s network of expert moms.
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The US Attorney’s office for California, Eastern District today announced the official sentencing of Gregory C. King, who had pleaded guilty earlier this year to two counts of transmitting code to cause damage to a protected computer. The charges were laid against Mr. King after four years of investigation in regards to his repeated attacks against KillaNet Technology Ltd.’s web servers as well as for a shorter attack period against the web site known as Castle Cops. KillaNet Technology Ltd. is the parent company of Village Gamer and Digital Storm LAN. Along with Mr. King’s two year Federal prison sentence is a restitution order of over $69 000.00 USD for damages. Mr. King does have a 60 day period in which to address the restitution order with the Court, after which time it will become an official order. The Assistant US Attorney in charge of the case, Matthew Segal, thanked KillaNet’s staff for the amount of work which was done in providing evidence and documentation to support the case.

Everyone here at KillaNet Technology is very grateful to those who worked so hard to see this case through – the FBI agents in Sacramento, and of course Matthew Segal and his team in the US Attorney’s office, also in Sacramento.

Official Press Release (PDF)

In a statement issued earlier today, the US Attorney’s office in Sacramento, California announced that Greg King has pleaded guilty to two counts of transmitting code to cause damage to a protected computer. As part of the plea agreement Greg King agreed to a two-year US Federal prison sentence. As this is a US Federal case, Greg King will be required to serve the full sentence without parole. Actual sentencing for the case is scheduled to take place on September 3, 2008 at which time the presiding Judge may make additional conditions within the sentence, including court-ordered restitution.

This case arose from Greg King’s continual botnet attacks and hacking attempts against Village Gamer’s parent company, KillaNet Technology Ltd., dating back to early in 2004. The non-profit volunteer-run digital media resource community often withstood DDoS attacks of thousands of megabytes per second, which often resulted in damage to web files and databases or total web server downtime, not to mention lost time in regards to community development and the loss of many hours of family time.

Thanks to their commitment to the case and the hard work of FBI Special Agent Brian Scott and US Attorney Matt Segal, the KillaNet Technology community is very happy to see an end in sight to this ordeal, and will be looking forward to the date of Greg King’s sentencing to US Federal prison.

A copy of the official US State Attorney’s office press release is available here in pdf format.

…and a big explosion.

If anyone is wondering where all of our servers disappeared to, there was an electrical fire and explosion in the Houston data centre Saturday afternoon which effectively knocked the whole building offline as there was no power, and the fire department ordered the generators disconnected. I know we should be very grateful – and we are – that the explosion and resulting fire weren’t much worse. At least we still have our servers and didn’t suffer any data loss. Of course, it’s also a great thing that no one working at the data centre was injured.

As you can tell, the centre now has power and we are once again online with all servers and sites functioning, including the IRC. So – welcome back.

There may be some intermittent outages over the next two weeks as rebuilding takes place in the data centre, and when they take Phase 1 off of generator power and integrate it back in with full building power. This will most likely be done on a Saturday night, which is when our servers are at their quietest. In the meantime, we will hopefully remain online without problems and continue moving ahead with the development of this site.

Day one of the Vancouver Game Summit is now over, and day two is about to start – which leaves me very little time to file a full report with photos, I’ve just given all of you something to look forward to once VIGS and VIDfest are over. Consider this our trailer for great articles yet to come. There have been some great seminars, and today will be no different, culminating with the closing keynote address from members of the Call of Duty 4 development team. The seminars at tomorrow’s VIDfest look equally informative, and I’m looking forward to sharing all kinds of new information with our readers. Until then, I’m off to VIGS day two. Have a great day everyone.

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